


Dancing Beside Her

by Nevanna



Category: Firefly, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-26 13:36:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3852757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/pseuds/Nevanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River knows that Simon can't return her to her old self, but she recognizes her new self in a presence that nobody else can see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dancing Beside Her

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the Hurt/Comfort Bingo April Challenge: to choose at least one of four assigned prompts, and use it as the basis for a crossover of two or more fandoms. The prompt that I chose was "loss of identity."

River is trying to draw the girl that she sometimes sees out of the corner of her eye, but like too many of her memories, the face shifts and blurs when she tries to call it into her mind. She starts with the girl’s eyes, which she can see whenever she closes her own.

Simon has complimented all of her drawings, but there was always worry underneath his words: _should I ask her about this, is she trying to tell me something, do I really want an answer?_ He was the one who bought her the pad of drawing paper and the colored pens on their last supply run. He says that when they were children, before she became more interested in scientific formulae and dance steps, she loved to draw. He tells a lot of those stories, about a younger and happier River whose mind wasn’t sliced open with doors that won’t close. A River who didn’t start screaming at the sight of a dozen pairs of hands, drawn on her own paper in the same blue ink, because she couldn’t remember putting them there but knew what they meant…

Now, Simon leans over her shoulder. “Nice,” he murmurs. “Is she… someone you know?”

“I think so.” The girl in the picture is River’s shadow and her dancing partner and her bedtime story, trailing bubbles of laughter and schools of fish that swim through the air. At night, she whispers stories of her older siblings, of Earth-That-Was, and of the time before. Her voice sounds like dancing feels, and swimming, but it also sounds like dizziness and drowning. Nobody else on the ship can see her.

“What’s her name?”

“Then, or now?” River frowns at the paper. She thought she could trust her memory of the girl’s eyes, of which one is green and which is blue, but now she isn’t as sure. “Delirium used to be Delight, before she spun away and started to unravel. Bits and pieces of everything and nothing got tangled up inside her…” She slashes at the air with her pen as if writing an equation on an invisible screen. “It twisted her into something else.”

Simon catches River’s hand in his own. “Don’t talk like that,” he says. “We’re going to find a way to bring you back to your old self. I promise.”

“ _No_.” The word tears from River’s throat. She flings the pen down and pulls out of his grip. “There _is_ no old self anymore. Not for her, and not for me. You can wind us back together but the pattern won’t be the same.” Even when she doesn’t want to, she recognizes more of herself in Delirium than she recognizes in Simon’s stories of their home on Osiris. “I’m sorry,” she says, because she knows that he is wrapped in loss and grief, _choked_ in them, every time he looks at her.

Somehow, he still manages to nod. “I’m starting to understand that,” he says, and this time, she thinks that it might be true. “I just don’t want you to keep hurting from whatever the Alliance did to you.” When he reaches out to brush a strand of hair behind her ear, she lets him.

She will have to find the words to tell him that there is no going back, only ahead, even if Delirium is dancing beside her with every step.


End file.
